1. See my extensive documentation of the Request Concert project in Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (Routledge, 1993), p. 91–161, first published in New Theatre Quarterly, August 1987, November 1987, and February 1988.

2. Pavis, Patrice, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture (Routledge, 1992), p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. This is one of the reasons why I had such problems with Peter Brook's essentialized and universalist reading of the text. See ‘Peter Brook's Mahabharata: a View from India’, Theatre and the World, op. cit., p. 68–87.

4. For a more detailed context, see my ‘Anatomy of Official Cultural Discourses: a Non-Government Perspective’, Economic and Political Weekly, XXVII, Nos. 31–2, p. 1667–76.

5. I was alerted to this reality while working with Alaknanda Samanth on an excerpt from Chekhov's The Seagull in Hindi as part of an original theatre piece called Prakriya (Process), briefly discussed in Theatre and the World, op. cit., p. 248–9. While working in Pune (where the dominant language is Marathi), we were initially elated to encounter a native speaker of Hindi from Benares, who also happened to be a professor of Russian literature and language. Unfortunately, this ‘source’ was of no use, because the professor had no real feeling for ‘theatre language’. His grammar was anti-theatrical.

6. The ‘indigenous’ uses of English in translations of Indian literatures into English have become a subject of some intercultural/intracultural debate. Addressing the criticism that her radical translations of Mahasweta Devie's stories are not ‘sufficiently accessible to readers in India’, Gayatri Spivak has acknowledged that the English of her translations ‘belongs more to the rootless American-based academic prose than the more subcontinental idiom of her youth’. But she then poses an ‘interesting question’ unique to India: ‘should Indian texts be translated into the English of the subcontinent?’ See ‘Translator's Preface’, Imaginary Maps (Calcutta: Thema, 1993, p. xxvi). In my view, most ‘subcontinental English’ translations of Indian fiction are almost insufferably archaic and academic. The implicit colonization of language in these translations de-politicizes, if not ‘bourgeoisifies’ the revolutionary fiction of writers such as Mahasweta Devi and Samik Bandyopadhyay. In this essay, however, I am dealing with a different problem insofar as I am questioning the process of translation from English into an Indian language, not the other way around. It is in this context that I would uphold the multiple resonances of English available in the subcontinent, notably in the registers that would be considered ‘archaic’ in the West.

7. See my section on ‘The Communal Unconscious’ in my essay ‘Somebody's Other: Disorientations in the Cultural Politics of Our Times’, Economic and Political Weekly, 15 January 1994, p. 106–07. Here I describe how I ‘saw’ Woyzeck emerge during an improvisation with actors at deep archetypal levels, wherein the Other was constructed through an unconscious externalization of communal violence.

8. The spinning-wheel is introduced in my production as a prop, signifying love, trust, and work, in the scene where Solveig (Gulabi) pledges her life to Gundegowda. It reappears in the second half of the production when Gulabi has aged (the passage of time suggested perfunctorily through a white wig held on a stick). In her final appearance – performed in a totally non-naturalistic mode, with the actress facing the audience with a combination of rage, grief, and loss Gulabi holds three objects: the spinning-wheel, the wig, and an earthen lamp. As Aase (Taiamma) reappears from the shadows of death, she and Gulabi sing a lullaby as they rock two of the Gundegowdas in their arms, while the third Gundegowda inspects the props left by Gulabi, and, in the final beat of the production, focuses his gaze on the spinning-wheel. (A detailed semiotic analysis of the mise en scène would reveal the recurrence of the numeral ‘three’ in the conceptualization and blocking of the production.)

9. The terms ‘interlingual’, ‘intralingual’, and ‘intersemiotic’ are drawn from Roman Jacobson's classifications of translation, described in Bassnett, Susan, Translation Studies (Routledge, 1991), p. 14Google Scholar.

10. The ‘cutting of a finger with a knife’ refers to that amazing, wordless character who is Peer Gynt's Other, insofar as he is an honest, family man who remains ‘true to himself’, even if he is an ‘enemy of the state’ (he maims himself as a youth in order to resist being recruited into the army). I find it unacceptable (dramaturgically and conceptually) that this character should be cut in most western productions, sometimes for the most facile reasons. The ‘slitting of a throat with an invisible pen’ refers, of course, to that formidable lunatic, an erstwhile Minister of State, who identifies himself as a pen, and then slits his throat with a knife. Both examples of ‘cutting’ and ‘slitting’ can be read, at some level, as acts of self-castration.

11. Patrice Pavis, ‘Toward Specifying Theatre Translation’, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, op. cit., p. 137–42.

12. The only explicit reference to the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) was to be found in the heavily Sanskritized rhetoric of the lunatic Huhu (Rataratam), whom Peer encounters in the asylum. Huhu is obsessed by his need to return to ‘the primal language’, ‘our real forest-tongue’, which was Ibsen's way of satirizing a group of national language reformers of his own time, whose aim was to restore the Norwegian language to its former state of ‘purity’. Within the feverish rhetoric of Rataratam, Raghunandana evoked the mania so prevalent among Indian fundamentalist groups to live in an absolute past that incarnates an eternal Purity.